This
book is considered to have been written by Jeremiah in relative consequence
to his days of being the Lord's prophet and having seen the eventual literal
distrcution of Jerusalem.
In particular, Lamentations brings to bare the fact that though Jeremiah was
God's prophet, Jeremiah was still very much a person as you or I. In contrast
to the prophet Jonah, who sat upon the hill in the shade to view the
prophesied destruction of Ninaveh and who was disappointed when it came not;
Jeremiah had also so prophesied as a young man in the days of Josiah and he
saw the king and people lead by that king repent. Later Jeremiah would again
be called upon by the Lord to again warn the people in the days of Jehoakim
and thence see a particle fulfillment in the sieges of Babylon and its taking of a goodly
twice a part of the populous captive to Babylon. Then again as an old man in
the days of Zedekiah, how Jeremiah would have hoped that Zedekiah and the
Jews would heed the warning voice, but they did not. And much to Jeremiah's
anxiety, the full force of destruction came in and totally destroyed
Jerusalem and carried all but a few off to Babylon. And though as a prophet
Jeremiah had prophesied it to be so, it still was a shock to Jeremiah the
person, and this can be readily seen and felt in Jeremiah's words of
Lamentations. And as Tevye of Fiddler on
the Roof would put it, on the one hand the people had done it to themselves
and yet on the other hand all things are in accord and under the mind and
direction of the Lord. Thus as a human observer, Jeremiah lays the matter at
the feet of the Lord in Lamentations in that 'the Lord had destoryed his own
people' and Jeremiah bitterly laments and sorrows as a real person because of
it.
As literature, Lamentations is of high Hebrew poetry whether
written by the hand of Jeremiah or his scribe – it is in acrostic form like
psalm 119. You might like to look
at it in your Bible. Except for chapter 3 which bewails at length, the
chapters each have 22 verses.
Although not apparent in English, each verse in chapters 1, 2 and 4 begin
with a succeeding letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Chapter 3 itself has 66
verses, each three in a row beginning with a new Hebrew alphabet
letter. |
